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customer success at a startup looks like you know i would say three main things so one day you might be doing more customer experience work like high level strategy whatever working with product really closely to say making to make a bucket and say blue because no one's finding it and i will note that this is incredibly fast paced so you might actually get a project from idea to deployment in less than a day [Music] well hello everyone this is erie isis for csm practice the customer success consulting firm today we have jennifer chang who is the director of customer success for yelp technologies young technologies is a young startup and so jennifer is the head of customer success working with another csm at the company and she started the customer success function but she didn't stop there of course she took all of her experiences and she wrote a fabulous book and the book's name is the startup guide to customer success and i'm really thrilled to have her and share all her insights with us and her experience going through you know the evolution of customer success of her organization so identifier welcome to the channel thanks for having me by the way guys if you go to our csm practice website under blogs we have 10 books that are recommended for customer success managers and professionals and jennifer's book is in our top 10 so you're welcome to go out there and download the entire list if you're looking for something to read before we start i'd like to remind everyone subscribe to our youtube channel for all the great videos that we produce on customer success so jennifer what does customer success looks like for a young startup and how does your day look like as a customer success manager of a team as well as you know i'm sure you have your own quota so your own book of business tell me a little bit how does it look like at a startup yeah because our teams are just so small our day-to-days are a lot more varied so you'll be wearing many many different hats and i'm sure if i have to open my schedule right now my week this week looks completely different from last week and the week before because for success at a start looks like you know i would say three main things so one day you might be doing more customer experience work like high level strategy for our working with product really closely to say making to make a bucket and say blue because no one's finding it and i will note that this is incredibly fast paced so you might actually get a project from idea to deployment in less than a day and you know on other days you might be doing the more traditional customer success work working directly with clients building that trusted advisor relationship and understanding the pain points and challenges of folks and how we can help them reach that next level reach their goals last thing that i deal with more than other csms who aren't at startups is you know crunching the data we don't have the luxury of having a data analyst or a huge data team to help us so oftentimes we have to go out get that data ourselves build out the dashboard cells dive into it which i think is a lot of fun but some people may be a little daunted by it i've heard that comparatively we deal with a lot more firefighting than other css because of the smaller team size and just the younger cst maturity but i just think that's part of the role and it's quite fun you didn't start with customer success right but now you're the head of customer success small team but still when you just joined your company you weren't in customer success right yeah i was actually well as you joined the startup we were 10 people and one dog and every like half the team other than engineers were generalists so i was a generalist i was technically on the business development team we did things ranging from like marketing to sales to a lot of strategic work and so how did you end up being in customer success you have to pitch the function to the ceo i know many ceos in young startups don't necessarily understand the need for customer success and so it's even a struggle to start it up did you experience the same thing can you tell me a little bit about that process i would say that there's like three main prongs that i used the first thing and we brought it up a little bit earlier it's like we have to align on values with the ceo or the executive team and so for example like how are they thinking about the customer how are they thinking about lifetime value if at all is there alignment on how folks think about the customers because if there isn't not only will be harder to pitch but it's going to be much harder to operate once it is official right you want someone who understands what's going on once we got that aligned i think the second and third prongs were around data so one prong around qualitative data and another one around quantitative data so the qualitative data showed impact you know having those customers stories that showed how having someone there to guide customers and use the product successfully was helpful and how a dedicated resource paid off in you know referrals and testimonials and you know though we didn't have that many at the beginning it was good to see that trends were looking pretty good and last but not least is the quantitative data which showed both impact and potential like and very importantly potential and this is all through the numbers and in my case i first showed how currently with no one really thinking about the customer's success and onboarding them properly that had led to poor retention rates which is not a good business model and then so when i showed them if we were just to improve retention rates by one percent by 5 and how easy that would be just like having someone think about the customer experience having someone create a very simple success plan for folks how that would affect the business how much more revenue that would bring in just one year in two years and five years down the line and then you just say like what if there's a whole person dedicated to this maybe you'll see an increase in 10 20 maybe even more when you build out that case it's really hard to refute so and that's how i did it you know three prongs align on values share impactful stories and then show the potential through data and so you got yourself into a full-time position doing just customer success how long did it take you to get a budget for another csm oh yeah i mean at a startup because you got a hustle you gotta have great you have to first prove out the concept yourself before you have the budget to hire people and i seen this you know it's not just a customer success thing it's you know if you're building out a marketing team that sales team you always have to prove it out yourself people always love when ceos or just the first people building the verb will understand what's going on and are not just delegating everything so at my startup i was a one-woman show for about a year doing everything from going to clients in person to onboard folks to crunching in numbers um to building out mvps or minimal viable products of things that i knew customers would want but yet i don't have the case to ask engineering to do it yet or did i have the budget to ask engineering to do it yet so i try to build everything myself and then once i had a better understanding of what worked and what didn't work that's when i started out building on my processes and building a very very simple playbooks and this helped me to understand one what could i automate and then what could i outsource and what exactly i needed a team member to do because i don't want someone to come in and do things that i could easily automate that is not a good business case and so once i was able to think all that through and pitch it to the ceo it was much easier to say these are the potential impacts a new cst member would have and that's kind of how i got it so you got the budget and you were on your way to hire people how did you interview a csm for a very young startup obviously the customer success is just morphing what were you looking for in terms of skills and the type of person that would thrive under this kind of environment when you're interviewing candidates for you know startup csms i like to ask them questions about how they would fit in a startup because that fit is super important you know how do they approach ambiguity and can they execute on strategic objectives and they have to be okay with ambiguity because startups have a lot of high highs and a lot of equally low lows and folks need to be able to handle that i've brought on people early on that they said hey i know how to handle this situation i love wearing many hats i love you know the hustle and bustle only to find them a few months and barely holding on and seeing how anxious they are so i would always say if you want to you know look to either interview i would look for that grit that hustle and i think a really good self-test to see if you have that quality is if i were to say to you you know i want you to go out figure out who the customer is and you may ask well what's our starting point what do we know so far what materials do we have so far and i tell you we know absolutely nothing and you know that sinking feeling that you may have just got one that happens a lot and if that scares you then you know perhaps a startup isn't for you and maybe you want to look for like a medium size or a little bit of a larger startup or even a bigger company but that feeling motivates you it makes you think wow i can start from zero and figure this all out by myself and that's when you can start thinking hey maybe there's something here to be a startup csm i think that's one big thing you know how do you handle it and how do you handle ambiguity are you able to have that grit that hustle and really have it not just say you do and i think the second big thing i look for when hiring a candidate is culture fit and yes you know culture fit is a word that's thrown out there a lot but i think it's important for both you the applicant and the company to think about so for startups i'm often looking for resilience and resourcefulness you when you interview those folks can you give me an example of questions you would ask them to find that out or even scenario or tests you would give out just make sure that you hire properly one of the assignments i give is actually i asked applicants to pitch our product to me and as an education technology startup csm i'm often re-pitching our product to stakeholders that weren't on sales calls so for example if we're working with a district maybe i'm working with the teachers and they the teachers have never heard of you know what are we working on like they just got this new thing so i asked applicants to prepare a pitch as in take home assignment and then present the pitch at the next call that they have with me and you know the reality is i am not looking for information accuracy i'm actually looking for resilience and resourcefulness sometimes i hear when i get the assignment back i hear oh well you didn't give me that many materials to review so i couldn't really prepare much you know and that tells me you know they may not be completely ready because if i were to hire them i may need to hold their hand more and then however sometimes i hear from applicants well you know even though you didn't give me that much material i went to every blog post i scoured their website and i think i came up with something and that tells me they have that resilience that resourcefulness um that is needed to work in a tech startup just thinking about your type of startup is this the type where let's see if it sounds like you guys handle a lot of accounts each not like seven or even 25. would that be a correct statement like what is the system ratio we were talking about here yeah so i think for context my company recently pivoted strategies from business to consumers of b2c to business business with b2b so you know focusing on selling directly to parents versus focusing on selling directly to schools so the numbers shifted quite a bit i will say in the past each csm handled you know about a few hundred accounts whereas now each csm handles roughly 25 accounts and i think this added focus is a unique startup advantage because it allows us to spend more time with each customer and really dive in and understand what is going on or what is or isn't working of course we're only a year in so into this new b2b strategy so i hope to bring that ratio a little bit closer to 1 to 31 to 50 depending on school sizes but we'll see how it goes so when we were at the higher range how much of the role did data and analysis play i think you said it was one of your third prongs what kind of analysis have you done what was really important for you at that time yeah data and information is just absolutely crucial i mean otherwise you'd be making the same mistakes over and over again that's not good so when it comes to data i think first i want to say i only see folks for getting to understand what their objective is and i think this is a common mistake that people make because more often than not you can't just look at a raw set of data and just expect the conclusion to come out at you by understanding what your objective is of looking at data you can better work the data to find the trends that you need without getting too lost and then as for the trends themselves i actually recommend for startups especially those very early on to focus on what i call like step one metrics you know those metrics are leading indicators to big metrics so something that leads to churn but not necessarily churn turn is still a good metric you should still look at churn but when you're so early on i highly recommend just focusing on understanding those metrics that come before it so a really great example is adoption metrics because after all if no one's adopting i'm pretty sure no one's going to be retaining yeah things like that two more things i'll actually caution when it comes to data and this is very unique to startups is first sometimes at startups you actually don't have all the data that you're looking for and so you might be working really closely with product to track the data and ensure that before features are released you have a way of collecting the data because not everything's automatically tracked so you gotta do a little bit more searching another thing i also know especially if you're trying to revolutionize the game as a startup you there actually may not be that much benchmark data out there for you to compare to so and i know we're always looking like is if my churn is you know x percent is that good is that bad by the startup it's really hard to tell if especially if you're you know doing something completely different you have to be comfortable with that ambiguity you know don't be too discouraged if you run into that as a startup you know you have so many customers that you need to deal with and so little resources you don't have you know the budget to buy necessarily like a customer success application right off the bat what kind of tools and software did you use to scale up even when it was just yourself what kind of productivity tools or anything that you found yourself using a lot to make a difference for you so at the end of the day like what do you really need as a csm you need some way to track who your customers are you need some way to measure what they're doing and i think you need some way of communicating with them you know if you boil that down that can be as simple as email and google sheets which is what i did um for at least a couple of years before i started building out and buying other things so that's kind of what i did you kind of focus on the basics focus on what you exactly need especially when you're super small and you don't have playbooks you don't have a really good idea of you know what you're even doing keeping something very lean and flexible and something that you can change very quickly is the name of the game so i would focus on that if you are going to get something else the next tool i would look at would be an email automation tool because those things are life savers and projects or something yeah so i first started using get another mail merge because that was free and starters are all about that and then after that we started looking into the bigger companies such as like sending blue um active campaign and things like that where did you manage your client list was it google sheets or did you use something smarter yeah so what's so funny is that i started out with google sheets and we had some new people come in they're like oh well we need to graduate from google sheets and i'm like okay what do you recommend and we went straight to salesforce and that was actually a really bad idea because for a startup of our size salesforce did not allow us to have that flexibility to add things change things because we were still figuring out half our processes right because of startup nothing's completely set in stone just yet so that was not a best move try to find something a little bit more flexible a little bit smaller medium and happy medium or did you go back to google sheets so actually we now use slack as our kind of our crm which is actually really fun what about user community and webinars what do you use so when it comes to webinars you know good old zoom good old old-fashioned you know google meets things like that keeping it simple trying new things in order to build that community what are your three most favorite google extension as a customer success manager i'm a little old school but i think my favorite one i mean i use yet another mail merge quite a lot so i think that was really great sending later is also a godsend i know that google recently did not make it an extension built it in but for a really long time while i was building on my team that was still technically an extension so i think that's probably one of my favorite ones and i think the last one for me is reminders that's awesome well lots of great tips for someone who's either thinking about moving to work at a small young startup as a csm both from tactical tips on you know what google extension should you be thinking about the tools in general to have to think about what to concentrate on to make that customer success function successful and improve your value quickly i want to thank you for your time jennifer guys if you stay session check out the comments below we're going to add a link to how you can find uh jennifer's book about customer successful startup as well as links to the extensions she mentioned so thank you so much for sharing those guys i'll see you at the next [Music] video